NEW BOOK – “Sex & War”
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The notion that war is intrinsic to man’s nature is dealt a powerful setback in Stan Goff’s Sex and War. Goff, a former Special Forces sergeant, argues persuasively that rather than being born that way, men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power. Drawing both on his experiences in the military and on his reading of feminist writers such as Patricia Williams, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty — and as the father of a son stationed in Iraq — Goff journeys through wars, ideologies, and cultures, revealing the transformation of men into killers. His story encompasses not just the battlefield and the book, but the Swift Boat Veterans controversy, the eros of George W. Bush, pornography, the Taliban, and gays and lesbians in the military. Goff’s remarkable ability to connect his own personal experiences to contemporary feminist criticism makes for a provocative discussion of war and masculinity.
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On “Sex & War”
“Men should thank Stan Goff for this loving challenge to us to reject all aspects of the male dominance of our society. In his riveting blend of personal experience and thoughtful analysis, Goff stares down the most brutal aspects of masculinity without flinching, as he opens up a crucial discussion about how we can get beyond being “real men” and beyond the cruel institutions and practices men have created.”
Dr. Robert Jensen
Professor, School of Journalism at University of Texas, Austin
author of “Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our Humanity” (City Lights Books, 2004)
***
“In Goff’s hands, the language of militarism, redemption, violence, sexist-misogyny, and war are prosaic yet poetic grenades, lobbed at American empire, television, the Hollywood cinematic machine with its mind-numbing trifles, religion, and neo-cons and iconoclasts like Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Michael Moore –the sacred and the profane are thrashed out in this opus on sex and war. Like prophesied deliverance, Goff’s insights should move those of us hitherto wishy-washy liberal-leftists, complacent hard leftists, and the
seeming voices-in-the-wilderness race-gender-class radicals to rethink our strategies for bringing about a new human condition.”
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, (Ph.D., Brown, 1994) (Director) teaches comparative diasporic literary and cultural movements, Francophone Studies, critical race studies, feminist theory, Jazz Age Paris, film and hip hop culture. She is also Professor of French and Italian. Her books include Negritude Women (2002), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (1999), Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998). She has co-edited three volumes, the latest of which includes The Black Feminist Reader (Blackwell, 2000). She is currently working on two books, one on young black women and hip hop culture and the other on black women in Paris from the 17th to the 19th centuries.
***
SEX AND WAR
By Stan Goff
Reviewed by William T. Hathway
“Stan Goff was the ultimate warrior, a combat-hardened member of the Rangers, Special Forces, and Delta Force. His conscience proved stronger than his military indoctrination, however, and he quit and turned against the state’s institution of terror. Once outside it, he devoted himself to understanding the social and psycho-sexual roots of organized violence. SEX AND WAR is his third and most ambitious book on this topic.
“The book is constructed as a mosaic, and that’s a difficult art form. Each piece needs to have its own discrete integrity, and it also needs to fit together with the others into a whole.
“Stan Goff has mastered this technique. SEX AND WAR is written in riffs and blips, in shards, with lots of edges. Some English comp instructors would give it a D for organization. But this seems the right form for this topic in our fragmented time. When the reader pulls back from the pieces, the overall pattern emerges. The book has two perspectives: in your face and off the wall.
“Goff writes often with grace, always with energy, and almost always with clarity, but his zest for theory sometimes propels him into convoluted, abstract sentences that require a second reading to spring forth the meaning, but the backpedaling is worthwhile.
“He flashes from vivid descriptions of his military operations, to related stories of the plight of women forced to live under patriarchal militarism, to insightful renderings of the stunted psyches of warriors, to Marxist analysis of the US’s violent drive for hegemony, then he connects us to the work of other writers on these issues, thus extending the discussion out in many directions.
“He gives us insider reports on the military mentality that make clear the inevitability of atrocities. Then in a synaptic leap he shows that the abuse of women is a similar syndrome but much more widespread throughout society. In his portrait of a Delta Force friend turned rapist, we see how rape in all its varieties is a mainstay of patriarchy as a whole, not just its military branch.
“Goff was a medic, among other things, in the Special Forces. Now he emerges as a diagnostician of the pandemic pathology of our culture. And like a good medic, he has suggestions for curing us of this disease of sexualized violence.
“SEX AND WAR is both a personal and an analytical tour de force. It’s a book that only Stan Goff could write, and I’m very glad he did.”
William T. Hathway is author of the novels A WORLD OF HURT and SUMMER SNOW.
Yolanda Carrington:
Congratulations!!!
7 January 2006, 8:57 pmHelga Fremlin:
Hi Stan,
7 January 2006, 9:30 pmyour book sounds great! And I was scared when I heard E O Wilson say in a speech a few years ago that war was indeed ‘intrinsic to man’s nature’. I beg to differ! What about Robert Fisk whose book ‘The Great War for Civilisation’ I am reading at the moment? He also has a different view ..
All the best,
Helga from down under
http://travelvictoria.com.au/daylesford/
Targe Lindsay:
Sounds great!
8 January 2006, 1:25 amOrdered it.
Can’t wait.
Erda:
What if we had, throughout hominid dominion on this planet, devoted our thought and resources not to killing our neighbors but to providing for each other, curing illness, advancing constructive and artistic culture and grateful caring for the land, where might we be?
8 January 2006, 2:18 amYet forever we have accepted the rune that bone-breaking bloody is “just the way men are.”
Thank goodness for Stan’s glimpse of hope. As long as the human race is never safe in its own bed while its own members are on the loose, there is simply no hope for advancement of this civilization beyond our murderous history.
Randy Morris:
Order early? Hell, I pre-ordered the damn thing!
Go, Stan, Go!
(Some days I think I single-handedly keep Amazon and my local bookstore in business)
8 January 2006, 3:26 amSks:
“Goff writes often with grace, always with energy, and almost always with clarity, but his zest for theory sometimes propels him into convoluted, abstract sentences that require a second reading to spring forth the meaning, but the backpedaling is worthwhile.”
Someone needs ritalin… :>
anyways, congrats! ill be sure to get a copy soon enough…
And great title, gender has been ultra-explored, but sex, man, thats the weapon of gender oppression…
Until the day we don’t rape in spite of ourselves…
8 January 2006, 4:47 amEmerson:
Congrats. Looking forward to it appearing at the local bookshops.
8 January 2006, 8:37 amelaina:
Hey, those run-on sentences read just fine to those of us who already “need” some ritalin.
Congrats on publication, Stan.
8 January 2006, 3:36 pmDevans00:
As a relatively recent fan, let me stand inline to wish you congratulations on your book.
Talk about convergence. I read the blurb above on the same day I posted an article to my blog about a man who got burnt by a “typically masculine” act. Being dominating and destructive a small animal he thought couldn’t fight back, didn’t quite turn out the way he’d hoped.
Mouse Set Ablaze Spreads Fire To House
9 January 2006, 5:24 pmhttp://tinyurl.com/7g4l3
William:
Congratulations, Stan, it’s simply great news that this book is on the way. I really hope to be able to arrange for you to come to Canada for a while to talk to folks about this.
9 January 2006, 7:07 pmblubonnet:
Stan,
I have no doubt many will be moved by your words, and inspired to be finer human beings.
I hope to see you making the circuit. I’d love to see you speak. I’ve seldom seen you. On FSTV I saw you briefly. If you are going to be out and about, presenting your book, we’d all love to know your schedule, that we might catch you on the tube.
10 January 2006, 3:45 ampeggy:
Thanks from the depths of countless hearts, Stan. This book is exactly what we’ve been needing for the longest time.
10 January 2006, 6:28 amJulian Real:
Congrats, Stan! I’m giving you a big hug right now, of appreciation and love, for telling the truth.
Julian
10 January 2006, 7:41 pmjon in seattle:
I’m pre-ordering from Powells.
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-193336811x-0
If you don’t mind me being ‘leftist than thou’, I’d ask you please promote the unionized Powells over Amazon. Powells is organized by an active rank and file local of the ILWU (when someone calls for ‘harry bridges’ on the intercom, all the staff gather for worker self-defense).
While Amazon…closed a customer service division when an organizing drive threatened (my own union, I take it personal) and further uses “GE management” on it’s tech employees, grading workers on a curve and requiring the bottom % to “improve” or be canned – regardless of whether they are meeting their expectations.
Powells will also pay a percentage for online sales based on click throughs just like Amazon.
12 January 2006, 3:53 pmStan:
Said, then done. New Powell’s link in.
Thanks Jon.
I stood alongside the ILWU in Charleston, and I stand by them now.
12 January 2006, 6:14 pmRandy Morris:
Jon:
Thanks for the link. Just changed my preorder from Amazon to Powells.
Good stuff!
13 January 2006, 2:50 pmChad:
Order through this link:
http://www.powellsunion.com/
for the 10% to go to the ILWU.
It may be $5.00 more than Amazon, but at least $1.60 of that goes to the union. Happy shopping!
14 January 2006, 4:53 pmpisswilly:
Drafted in ’68. Dirty Dog Delta, Every Man a Killer, Sir!
26 January 2006, 10:16 pmThe hand of God in the Pentagon computer thankfully sent me to the Korean DMZ instead of to Nam. There, the mission of the 2nd Infantry Division was to die valiently if Joe jumped south. Our bodies would function as an insurance policy, guaranteeing that Uncle Sam would keep its treaty committment to the ROK that a massive counter attack (perhaps with nukes) would be the price paid for any full scale invasion from the north. We were a bloody trip wire.
Meanwhile, LBJ and Nixon lied and lied, and orchestrated the great SE Asian genocide. Johnson was a true believer, Nixon a vile manipulator who prolonged the killing chiefly for domestic political gain. Yet neither was damn fool enough to taunt Ho or Kim to “Bring it on!”, in the delusional belief that we were fighting the Commies “over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”
Little George, however, has put the current generation of grunts into a mission in Iraq in which their very function is to draw fire so we can retaliate with hi tech indiscrimination (re-packaging aggression as self defense). The civilian brain trust of the Pentagon thinks only with its little head. The day-to-day tactics of the Mesopotamia occupation multiply our enemies and feed their righteous wrath. This is a military mission designed to incite attack. It functions as the exact opposite of deterrence, fomenting insurgency and religious fanaticism.
Courtesy of Karl Rove, George the GWOT President has thusfar reaped enormous domestic political gain, solidifying and expanding the troglodyte base of the GOP (while neatly splitting and pitting the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party base against its pro-war national leadership). As Noam Chomsky recently reminded, it was Ronald Reagan who first declared “war on international terrorism.” Thus, the excesses of Watergate and Iran-contra are conjured back to life under the guiding hand of John Negroponte. Is it too late now to drive a stake or two or three into some dead Presidential hearts?
Stan Goff is right: the nexus of war and sex somehow must fuel the beast. Little boys are not born killers, but killing certainly is what gets some of the big boys to the top of the food chain and the power pyramid.
Primitive tribes sought to break the cycle of atrocity and xenophobic counter-atrocity by treating women like property. My Chief gives his daughter to your clan, and your Chief reciprocates by giving up his daughter to mine. That done, if you plot to break the truce and come treacherously in the night to annihilate my village, you’ll be murdering, raping and enslaving your own sisters and grandchildren. Why, only a real motherfucker would even dream of doing a thing like that…..
Is declaring war on sexism the solution, or just another oxymoron like military intelligence?
I bet Stan’s book will offer insight into this, and other questions I’ve pondered over since making the transition from civilian to soldier to civilian.
See you in New Orleans.
Tom Wells:
Can’t wait to read Stan’s new book. The first two “worked” for me.
27 January 2006, 10:11 amAnd, a big kudo to “pisswilly” for the rousing words of a Friday morning.
Tom
Yashkanda.ets':
FYI. Gender and war, indeed…
How U.S. used Iraqi wives for ‘leverage’
Suspected insurgents’ spouses jailed to force husbands to surrender
The Associated Press
Updated: 3:39 p.m. ET Jan. 27, 2006
The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of “leveraging†their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.
In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family’s door telling him “to come get his wife.â€
The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.
The U.S. military on Thursday freed five of what it said were 11 women among the 14,000 detainees currently held in the 2½-year-old insurgency. All were accused of “aiding terrorists or planting explosives,†but an Iraqi government commission found that evidence was lacking.
Iraqi human rights activist Hind al-Salehi contends that U.S. anti-insurgent units, coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects’ houses, have at times detained wives to pressure men into turning themselves in.
Iraqi official refutes claim
Iraq’s deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali, dismissed such claims, saying hostage-holding was a tactic used under the ousted Saddam Hussein dictatorship, and “we are not Saddam.†A U.S. command spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, said only Iraqis who pose an “imperative threat†are held in long-term U.S.-run detention facilities.
But documents describing two 2004 episodes tell a different story as far as short-term detentions by local U.S. units. The documents are among hundreds the Pentagon has released periodically under U.S. court order to meet an American Civil Liberties Union request for information on detention practices.
In one memo, a civilian Pentagon intelligence officer described what happened when he took part in a raid on an Iraqi suspect’s house in Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004. The raid involved Task Force (TF) 6-26, a secretive military unit formed to handle high-profile targets.
“During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target’s surrender,†wrote the 14-year veteran officer.
He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway.
“The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing,†the intelligence officer wrote. She was held for two days and was released after he complained, he said.
Like most names in the released documents, the officer’s signature is blacked out on this for-the-record memorandum about his complaint.
Of this case, command spokesman Johnson said he could not judge, months later, the factors that led to the woman’s detention.
Undisclosed number of women
The second episode, in June 2004, is found in sketchy detail in e-mail exchanges among six U.S. Army colonels, discussing an undisclosed number of female detainees held in northern Iraq by the Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division.
The first message, from a military police colonel, advised staff officers of the U.S. northern command that the Iraqi police would not take control of the jailed women without charges being brought against them.
In a second e-mail, a command staff officer asked an officer of the unit holding the women, “What are you guys doing to try to get the husband — have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?â€
Two days later, the brigade’s deputy commander advised the higher command, “As each day goes by, I get more input that these gals have some info and/or will result in getting the husband.â€
He went on, “These ladies fought back extremely hard during the original detention. They have shown indications of deceit and misinformation.â€
The command staff colonel wrote in reply, referring to a commanding general, “CG wants the husband.â€
The released e-mails stop there, and the women’s eventual status could not be immediately determined.
Of this episode, Johnson said, “It is clear the unit believed the females detained had substantial knowledge of insurgent activity and warranted being held.â€
© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
27 January 2006, 8:47 pmrsklnkv:
Stan,
13 February 2006, 3:57 pmWaiting anxiously for the new book…
As a worker at Powells I wanted to say thanks for the ILWU support(we’ll have plenty of copies)! We’re coming up on another contract renewal in the next few years, so wish us ‘luck’.
A few of us have been tossing around the idea of trying to raise the dollars to get you out here for a reading, etc.
Any thoughts?
Chris:
Any word on when the book will be released? I’m planning on putting it on the Staff Recommendations shelf at the bookstore I work at but it seems to be a little behind schedule.
17 February 2006, 5:55 pmThe paranoid angel/demon on my shoulder keeps whispering that it’s being suppressed while his/her counterpart on the other shoulder reassures me that “They” wouldn’t want to draw that much attention to it. “They” would rather let it be published quietly and put some troll-style reader comments on Amazon to discourage would-be readers. Not to mention tracking orders…oops, that’s the angeldemon talking again.
Charles Brown:
Congratulations on your book, Stan. It is very important to teach all that war is not inherent to human nature. Humans originated 200,000 years ago or so. War originates only 8,000 years ago or so. For the vast majority of humans’ time on earth, we had not the institution of war.
It is also important to teach that male supremacy origiates around the same time as war, that is the state, and private property.
Male supremacy is not human nature either ! Like war, it is taught.
Let us abolish war, male supremacy and capitalism.
Charles Brown
24 February 2006, 3:02 pmStan:
For any and all who have ordered “Sex & War,” I apologize that the publisher and I have reached an impasse about the publication. I am setting up a link on this site in the next few days to allow people to purchase “Sex & War” directly from here as a pdf file. Watch the right column, where the category “AA – Buy ‘Sex & War’” will link you to instructions on how to purchase the book.
Thanks all.
7 April 2006, 7:46 pm